Cultural Dessert

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Heliotrope Chamber Ensemble concert

28 May 2015

Heliotrope Chamber Ensemble is a Northampton-based wind quintet, occasionally augmented by additional players. I played with them in a concert two years ago (reviewed here in April 2013) which included the UK premiere of 'Sacred Women' by the contemporary American composer Jeff Scott. Last Saturday I joined Heliotrope again for a concert performance of Richard Strauss's 'Suite in B flat major'. This is a very early work by Richard Strauss (opus 4) – written when he was still a teenager – but it is a lovely piece and very enjoyable to play. It's an interesting challenge playing in a thirteen-piece wind ensemble without a conductor. You have to work hard to keep the music together and to avoid slowing down but I think our performance went very well. The concert also included the fiendishly difficult Nielsen 'Wind Quintet' which I last saw performed at a Music in the Brickhills concert in 2011 (reviewed here in June 2011). I was full of admiration for the Heliotrope Quintet who tackled this challenging work very impressively.

'Mr Mac and Me' by Esther Freud

28 May 2015

It was nearly twenty years ago when we first visited the beautiful village of Walberswick in Suffolk. We took the 'ferry' (a small rowing boat which charged 50 pence per person!) across the estuary to Southwold and, as we got out of the boat, we asked the ferryman what time he was due to finish for the day. “That was my last trip” he said, but reassured us that there was a footbridge a little further inland that we could use to return. That footbridge turned out to be quite a long way inland – a considerably longer return journey. It was only later that I learned of Walberswick's connection to the architect and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh who lived and worked there for a year from 1914. In 1997 I attended the Scottish launch of the seminal Comedia report 'Use or Ornament? The social impact of participation in the arts' at the recently completed 'House for an Art Lover' in Bellahouston Park in Glasgow. It was great to hear the report's author Francois Matarasso speaking about his groundbreaking work, but it was the building, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh with his wife, Margaret MacDonald, in 1901 but only built long after his death, that made the bigger impression on me. It was wonderful to revisit the House for an Art Lover on a trip to Glasgow in 2013. So it was fascinating to discover Esther Freud's novel 'Mr Mac and Me' (which I have just read as an unabridged audio book, narrated by John Banks) which deals with the time Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh spent in Walberswick and talks at length about their design for the 'House for an Art Lover'. Esther Freud's story is told by a local boy, Thomas Mags, whose father runs a pub in Walberswick (only ever referred to in the novel as 'the village'). Thomas is an aspiring artist and, like Charles Rennie Mackintosh, has a limp due to a damaged foot. The boy becomes friends with the Mackintoshes but, when the war with Germany begins, these outsiders are viewed with suspicion by the local community, particularly when correspondence in the German language is discovered amongst their possessions. The effect of DORA (the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act – which introduced the first licensing hours among many other measures) on local life is really interesting. 'Mr Mac and Me' is beautifully written but, at times, reads more like a diary than a novel. Despite the wartime setting, the pace of the plot is slow. Nevertheless I enjoyed discovering more about the Mackintoshes and it was lovely to bring together my own memories of Walberswick and the House for an Art Lover.

Friday, May 22, 2015

London Festival of Baroque Music concert

22 May 2015

In 2014, after 30 years of continuous support, Lufthansa withdrew its sponsorship from the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music. After a frantic 12 months of fundraising the Festival's Artistic Director, Lindsay Kemp, and his team have succeeded in presenting the first-ever London Festival of Baroque Music. On Sunday we were at St John's Smith Square in London to see the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Schola Pietatis Antonio Vivaldi present a programme of music by Vivaldi. In early 18th century Venice the Pieta was a foundling hospital which took in infants abandoned by their parents and deposited anonymously in a special niche in its wall. The children were fostered by local families and received a good education and vocational training. Nearly all the boys left aged 18 to take up occupations in the wider world but most of the female residents remained for their whole lives in the hospital. The girls were trained in handicrafts and music. When Vivaldi, who was a member of the hospital staff, wrote music for the Pieta choir his four-part harmonies were sung entirely by female singers with women unusually taking the tenor and bass parts. The Schola Pietatis Antonio Vivaldi aims to recreate this unfamiliar choral sound. It was strange to hear Vivaldi's 'Gloria' – one of his best known choral works – sung by the all-female choir. While the musical notes were the same, the timbre of the low female voices contributed to a very different choral sound. The choir were ably accompanied by the period instruments of the excellent Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, led by the charismatic violinist, Kati Debretzeni. Her performance of Vivaldi's 'Concerto in D major' at the end of the first half of the concert was fantastic – the delicate, playful cadenza at the end of the final movement had a packed audience collectively holding its breath – a magical moment. The whole concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and you can listen to it for the next 25 days at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05vh237

Friday, May 15, 2015

'Man and Superman' by George Bernard Shaw

15 May 2015

On Thursday this week we were at the Errol Flynn Filmhouse in Northampton to watch the NT Live broadcast of George Bernard Shaw's 'Man and Superman', live from the National Theatre in London. Simon Godwin's production squeezed Shaw's text down to a “compelling three and a half hours” but the time whizzed by. Ralph Fiennes is a compelling presence on stage, delivering his lines at a machine-gun pace but with every syllable completely clear and intelligible, and his physical acting is amazing. This was an incredibly funny production, with an extremely strong cast. Indira Varma, as Anne, was fantastic – her facial expressions and rapid mood-turns rivalling Fiennes as the standout performance. And Tim McMullan, as Mendoza and The Devil, almost stole the show. 'Man and Superman' is a long and very wordy play but this production created a multitude of laugh-out-loud moments and demonstrated how Shaw links the wit of Oscar Wilde to the cerebral thirst for knowledge of Tom Stoppard. Indira Varma and Ralph Fiennes were a 'Beatrice and Benedict' pairing that was both hilarious and remarkably touching.

Berlin

15 May 2015

We had a wonderful holiday in Berlin last week. This was my first visit to this fascinating city and it was great to explore it. We took bus and boat tours and visited the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, remaining sections of the Berlin Wall and Charlottenburg Palace. One of highlights of our trip was climbing to the top of Norman Foster's Reichstag Dome – you walk up a spiral ramp inside the massive glass dome, with amazing views out across the city as well as being able to look directly down into the German Parliament chamber (the people symbolically above the politicians). We also visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe – an amazing installation of 2,711 concrete slabs, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. We enjoyed the Pergamon Museum, particularly the enormous reconstruction of the Ishtar Gates of Babylon. It was interesting to be in Berlin in the week of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. There were lots of exhibitions about the war and we marked the anniversary of VE Day by attending a stunning performance of Benjamin Britten's 'War Requiem' at the Gethsemane Church. The War Requiem was written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, was built after the original fourteenth-century structure was destroyed in a World War II bombing raid. Britten combines the text of the Latin requiem mass with war poems by Wilfred Owen. I played in a performance of the War Requiem while I was at University in Birmingham, but I hadn't seen it performed since. The work requires massive forces – a symphony orchestra, chamber orchestra, choral society, boys' choir, organ and three soloists – so it always feels like a major event. This concert was presented by the Junges Ensemble Berlin and featured the Berlin youth orchestra and youth choir, together with the Prometheus Ensemble and the Berlin Cathedral Choir. It was conducted by Frank Markowitsch and Michael Riedel. Having so many people performing resulted in a sell-out audience of mostly young people and families. The concert started with a video collage projected on a large screen above the stage, showing scenes of conflict from World War II to Vietnam to modern-day Afghanistan and Iraq. This film was accompanied by a performance of Arvo Pärt's haunting 'Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten'. The dying chimes of the bell at the end of this piece merged seamlessly into the opening notes of the War Requiem. It was a wonderful concert, brilliantly performed and very moving – and an emotional end to our visit to Berlin.

Monday, May 11, 2015

'King John' by William Shakespeare

11 May 2015

When King John held court in Northampton he is known to have visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – a church built by the Earl of Northampton on his return from the crusades. This 12th century church is still standing and it was a wonderful setting, as we mark the 800th anniversary of John signing the Magna Carta, for the Northampton Royal & Derngate's production of Shakespeare's 'King John', which we saw there last Monday. 'King John' is definitely not one of Shakespeare's best plays, but James Dacre's production (the first Royal & Derngate co-production with Shakespeare's Globe) was a five-star theatrical experience. From the moment we entered the church to see the body of Richard the Lionheart lying in state in the circular sepulchre, surrounded by monks conducting his funeral, we were immersed in the action of the play. The amazing setting, lit almost entirely by candles, with the scent of incense ever-present, combined with original music written by Orlando Gough and Jonathan Fensom's stunning design, created a wonderfully atmospheric performance. It was a privilege to be among the sell-out audience crammed into the wooden church pews, watching the actors on a cross-shaped platform along the nave and transepts. Jo Stone-Fewings was excellent as King John and I was particularly impressed by the two youngest actors: Laurence Belcher (playing Arthur and Henry) demonstrated both compelling acting and a beautiful counter-tenor singing voice; and Aruhan Galieva as Blanche was a great singer making an impressive acting debut. 'King John' finishes its run in Northampton this weekend and then plays at Temple Church in London and Salisbury Cathedral before heading to Shakepeare’s Globe in June. Catch it if you can.

About Me

Since September 2005 Robin Simpson has been Chief Executive of Voluntary Arts, which provides a universal voice for approximately 63,000 voluntary arts groups, across the UK and Ireland, involving more than 10 million participants in creative cultural activities. A keen amateur French horn player, Robin is currently a member of the Northampton Symphony Orchestra. Robin is a perennial ballroom dancing student, a frequent theatre-goer, an enthusiastic reader of contemporary fiction, an insatiable consumer of classical and world music and a keen blogger at www.culturalplayingfield.org and www.culturaldessert.blogspot.com